Dead Pen Drives
polycounter lvl 19
After my second usb pen-drive (those little removable usb storage dealies) death in five months, I think my machine is killing them.
I have heard that you shouldn't leave them in your machine while you restart, but certain practises (like booting linux from a cd and pen drive) are actively encouraged.
My psu is only 450 watt, so I can't imagine it frying the drive?? I have installed games which use starforce, and I've heard that that can cause problems too.
My machine tried to run scandisk on the pen drive when I left it in, and that killed it stone dead. My next one will get removed every time I restart/reset, I rely on these things quite a lot, and lost a lot of recent work (I was starting my machine to back up the drive when it borked
Anyone else had any problems? Is the drive totally screwed? It still gets recognised, but windows says it's got '0' bytes.
I have heard that you shouldn't leave them in your machine while you restart, but certain practises (like booting linux from a cd and pen drive) are actively encouraged.
My psu is only 450 watt, so I can't imagine it frying the drive?? I have installed games which use starforce, and I've heard that that can cause problems too.
My machine tried to run scandisk on the pen drive when I left it in, and that killed it stone dead. My next one will get removed every time I restart/reset, I rely on these things quite a lot, and lost a lot of recent work (I was starting my machine to back up the drive when it borked
Anyone else had any problems? Is the drive totally screwed? It still gets recognised, but windows says it's got '0' bytes.
Replies
[edit] scratch that, it doesn't work. Bugger.
You should be able to right-click on the drive and delete the existing partition. Then create a new partition. Normally USB drives use the FAT filesystem, so make a new FAT partition, unless you specifically need NTFS. Once the partition is made, try formating it again.
Notman: I don't use linux (yet - not got into it). If all else fails, I'll keep the drive and try it again once I'm 'Linux 1337'.
[edit] The drive comes up as 'unreadable' in the disk management panel. I only have 'properties' and 'help' in the right-click menu. I guess it's borked.